Vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products (server, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud environments, including public and private cloud, increased 9.4% year over year in the third quarter of 2020 (3Q20), according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker. Investments in traditional, non-cloud, IT infrastructure declined -8.3% year over year in 3Q20.
Some highlights:
- Spending on public cloud IT infrastructure increased 13.1% year over year in 3Q20, reaching $13.3 billion. During the previous quarter spending on public cloud IT infrastructure exceeded non-cloud IT infrastructure spending for the first time ever, but non-cloud IT infrastructure spending was back on top in 3Q20 at $13.7 billion.
- IDC expects public cloud IT infrastructure spending to surpass non-cloud IT infrastructure spending again in the near future and expand its lead going forward.
- Spending on private cloud infrastructure increased 0.6% year over year in 3Q20 to $5.0 billion with on-premises private clouds accounting for 63.2% of this amount.
- IDC believes the hardware infrastructure market has reached a tipping point and cloud environments will continue to account for an increasingly greater share of overall spending.
- Within cloud deployment environments in 2020, compute platforms will remain the largest segment (49.1%) of spending, growing at 2.3% to $36.4 billion while storage platforms will be the fastest growing segment with spending increasing 27.4% to $29.2 billion, and the Ethernet switch segment will grow 4.0% year over year to $8.5 billion.
- Spending on cloud IT infrastructure increased across most regions in 3Q20, with the highest annual growth rates in Canada (32.8%), China (29.4%), and Latin America (23.4%). Growth in the United States was 4.7%. Japan and Western Europe declined by -6.7% and -3.4%, respectively. In all regions except Canada and Japan, growth in public cloud infrastructure exceeded growth in private cloud IT.
- Inspur, Huawei, and Lenovo had double-digit year-over-year growth while most other major vendors, including the ODM Direct group of vendors, had single-digit growth. Cisco was the only major vendor with a year-over-year decline.
